Morvern Lines - Outstanding Highland characters
I have been fortunate in my life to have met many remarkable and unusual characters.
How would you describe a ‘character’ and where can they be found these days is a question I am often asked.
According to my dictionary, you would recognise one by their individuality and personality in general. But in the Highlands and Islands the word takes on an altogether different meaning.
A character is someone who has a genuine pride and knowledge of the community they live in, is unafraid to stand up to the ‘Nanny State’, asks questions and goes quietly about doing acts of public good without looking for recognition or reward. Add wit, a few good stories - often told against themselves - humour, a natural intelligence and a cheerful outlook on life and you have it.
Where these characters have gone is not so easily answered.
National and local government must accept a lot of the blame in their unrelenting drive to dumb down the public.
Television, bureaucratic nonsense, social media and the almost total lack of awareness of the mores and customs of the country-side they live in are other contributory factors.
Donald and Agnes MacAllister, Tobermory, were two classic examples. Donald, who was always called ‘Doikes’ or ‘Dykes’, was the oldest of a family known on Mull as ‘the Dans’. There were four brothers and two sisters, some of whom now and again took up a semi-itinerant life leading to one of Tobermory’s leading ladies to say in their defence: “They are very respectable tinkers, they live mostly in a house, you see.”
At one point Doikes and Agnes, who had a good fund of stories and songs, lived in an old Co-op mobile shop in a quarry on the Glengorm road. It was an Albion, and presumably had become unviable to repair and was known as Co-operative Cottage.
After that they had a nice showman’s caravan at the top of Tobermory, but it was hit by a car which had gone off the road and although it was not mortally wounded, it was never quite the same again.
In April, Doikes and Agnes would migrate to their summer quarters at Craignure to be close to the shore where they gathered whelks when there wasn’t much forthcoming in the way of money in Tobermory.
Here they lived in the corner of a field under a temporary structure covered by a tarpaulin which they called ‘Canvas Cottage’ or Hayfield Hotel - no door and no bell’.
Doikes was a tall, well-built man who habitually wore a cheese-cutter cap. He roamed Tobermory, looking for a likely person to practise his irresistible charm on and to extract the price of a dram or two.
One day he went to the island plumber and asked him if he had a soldering iron. Thinking that Doikes wanted to borrow it and that if he met his request he would never see it again, the reply was: “No, I don’t.” Doikes then opened his jacket, produced one and announced: ‘You’re in luck, because I’ve one to sell.”
Angus Macintyre, the well-known story teller and bank manager in Tobermory, enjoyed Doikes’s craic and shared his love of the countryside and the sea.
Angus retired in the 1970s but still the locals believed if it had been “Angus’s bank” in Tobermory, the recession wouldn’t have hit Mull. Angus’s son Lorn, a former reporter with The Oban Times and a gifted poet and author whose latest book, The Summer Stance, is still available from Waterstones and on Amazon, tells me his parents were very good to the MacAllisters.
“Doikes wore my father’s cast-off business suits as if he were a financier, when he had nothing in his pocket. His wife Agnes was from Oban. I believe she wore my mother’s cast-offs, including silks and walked several paces behind her husband.”
Doikes was a fine seaman. In the summer he and Agnes, whom he called his long-haired mate, would often cross over to Tiree in their small open boat pushed along by a bit of a sail and an old Seagull outboard engine in search of new whelk beds.
I first met them at Lochaline where they had come to pick whelks. They had just walked from the hotel and were in good form and no wonder. Earlier in the day the proprietress of a small guest house along the Drimnin road had taken pity on them and given them a dozen bantam’s eggs which they managed to convince the new hotel owners from the south were plover’s eggs collected from the moors that day and were a rare delicacy.
I was not told how much they made but it must have been worth more than a couple of bucketfuls of whelks.
About the late 1970s, Doikes decided to give up their nomadic lifestyle - at least during the winter - and he and Agnes retired to a little house at Rockfield in Tobermory.
It was from here that one of the best stories I have of them came. It seems the old Seagull engine was causing trouble so one day, when Doikes was in the MacDonald Arms in Tobermory, he asked a friend, who was something of a mechanic, if he would go up to the house and look at it. He did, and there found the engine clamped to the bed end - and why not and where better when you have no tool shed or a bench to work on?
What the friend didn’t realise was that Agnes, a small lady, was lying in the bed under a heap of blankets recovering from a ceilidh they had been to the night before.
Finding the problem, he started the engine but somehow or other in amongst the general untidiness the propeller got caught in the bedclothes and round and round went Agnes!
Wanderers have played an important role in the social history of the Highlands. When I was working in the wonderful Oban Times archives a few years ago, I found an interesting and unusual report by the Strontian correspondent of June 18 1881, which I thought worth recording not only for its content but the style in which it was written.
‘On Saturday last the usual stillness of the place was broken by the appearance of a number of these obnoxious visitors [tramps], who created quite an uproar here. After refreshing the inner man at the hotel, they commenced swearing and fighting amongst themselves, to the alarm perhaps danger, of the lieges.
After indulging in such unruly pastimes for some time, one of the gang, inflamed by a spirit of bravado, entered the village smithy and began to threaten all and sundry; but the brawny knight of the anvil and hammer made his appearance and the fiend decamped. The whole party soon afterwards disappeared, to the great relief of the inhabitants of the place. These tramps are growing quite a pest here of late.’
On another occasion, which was not recorded in The Oban Times, the same gang started fighting with the locals outside the Strontian Hotel, or the London Inn as it was called then. It must have been quite a punch-up as the bystanders started putting bets on who would win.
The hero, who was chased out of the smiddy, even although he was lying on the ground, was so sure of himself, he began shouting to his mates: “Put your money on me boys, I’m winning on points.”
The report was unusual because tramps, or milestone inspectors as they were sometimes called, were generally welcomed. From spring onwards, their arrival was anticipated and eagerly awaited, not only for the news they brought from the outside world, but for the help they gave making hay, planting potatoes or cutting and carrying peats home at the backend.
In return they got at least one square meal a day, a roll of tobacco and a doss in the hay-loft.
Some carried small articles of haberdashery - buttons, needles, thread, bootlaces and ribbons - others were tinsmiths and mended pots and sharpened knives and scissors.
One or two were poets or musicians who played the mouth organ, tin-whistle or Jew’s harp.Many a croft house ceilidh they enriched with their tunes and stories long before the arrival of the wireless. No-one quite knew who these itinerant folk were or their real names. It was said of one or two that they had broken the law and were on the run or escaping from family problems.
One was believed to have been a doctor who had taken to drink and had been struck off the General Medical Register.
A lot of ex-servicemen took to wandering after the end of the Great War of 1914-18, probably suffering from what was then known as shell-shock but today called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
First, or nick-names, were often their only identification. The following is a selection of those who frequented Ardnamurchan, Mull, Sunart, Ardgour, Mull, Lochailort and Morvern: Wandering Wattie; Steenie the Warlock; Jimmy the Tramp; On Tour; Kelly; Watters; MacInally and Bodach na Fluraichean - the old man of the flowers - because he always had flowers in his cap, real ones in the summer and artificial ones in winter.
When Steenie found his way to Morvern he had the pick of a number of lodgings: Donald and Maggie Mackay’s hayshed at Ullin in the White Glen, a cave between Claggan and Craigendarroch and part of Gerard Craig Sellar’s, state of the art, central-heated dog kennels below Torr Molach on Ardtornish estate.
The popular 16th laird and chief of the Macleans of Ardgour who died suddenly in 1930 at an early age was fondly remembered in prose by Steenie: ‘Around the bay of Ardgour, for many years have I wandered, now sad is the hour when the chieftain is gone. In cottage or homestead when you mention his name an honest tear is shed for the gallant Maclean.... we bid you in peace adieu and sweet be your rest to our thoughts you were true, you were one of the best’.
In writing about Ardgour, I mustn’t forget the story of a family of travellers who used to park their old van in a quarry on Ardgour estate between Sallachan and Inversanda. Hearing that Miss Catriona Maclean of Ardgour, who had inherited the estate from her father Col Alexander, disliked unauthorised parking, they bought half a dozen Maclean tartan towels and hung them on their washing-line. Their quick-thinking met with the laird’s approval, so much so she allowed them to come and go at will.
One year they were there for so long a child was born in the back of the van over the rear axle so he was given the name Axle!
Jimmy the Tramp had been a piper in the Black Watch Regiment in the Second World War. He was captured by the Japanese and had a terrible time in a prisoner of war camp. When he was demobbed, he found that his wife and gone off with someone else and he didn’t see his daughter again and then went on the tramp.
Every spring Jimmy would visit Arisaig and Rannoch where he knew kind people and dug their vegetable gardens for them. He travelled by train, of course.
The West Highland Line drivers would stop the train and guards would put the ladder down from the old-style guard’s van for Jimmy and his bicycle and he would be dropped off before they reached a station.
Latterly he based himself in a tiny caravan at Ardgour. From there he would set off for Glenfinnan, Lochailort and Corpach along the Road to the Isles.
One dark wintery night, Mrs Cameron-Head of Inverailort almost ran into Jimmy between Corpach and Kinlocheil in her car.
So the next morning she went to Fort William Police Station and gave them some money to paint his mudguards with fluorescent paint for his own safety, knowing he wouldn’t.
One hard winter, Dr Michael Foxley, the local GP at the time, got Jimmy a room in Invernevis House Care Home on the outskirts of Fort William, which no doubt saved his life.
Sometimes Jimmy would go AWOL but the staff knew if he wasn’t in the back bar of the Nevis Bank Hotel, they would find him in the Corpach Hotel.
I remember meeting Jimmy in the late 1970s at Inverailort Castle where Mrs Cameron-Head always made sure he had a hearty meal whenever he called and that when he pedalled off there was enough food in his haversack for the rest of the week.
It was raining at the time and hearing that he had lost his cap, she went up to the attic and returned with a bowler hat which had belonged to her father-in-law James Head, who had been deputy chairman of the Union Castle shipping line.
It was made in St James’s Street, London, by James Lock & Co - the world’s oldest hat shop which also held two Royal warrants. Jimmy was proud of that hat.
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